New York City’s Turbulent Past Comes to Life in Maps

Matt Knutzen has a job that any map geek would envy, and a title to match. As the geospatial librarian for the New York Public Library, he oversees one of the largest map collections in the world. The library has 433,000 sheet maps and 20,000 atlases and books on cartography. The oldest maps in the collection date back to the 15th century.

Knutzen and his colleagues at NYPL have some very innovative ideas about how to make the library's map collection more accessible, more interactive, and more relevant in the digital age. I met some of these folks when I visited the library a few weeks ago, and I'll write more about what they're doing in a future post.

But I also wanted to see some of the paper maps while I was there. Knutzen kindly agreed, and for the better part of one morning he showed me one amazing map after another and patiently endured my endless stream of questions. This gallery shows off some of the ones we looked at. Many of them focus on New York City and the Dutch cartographers who first mapped it. They reveal a lot about the history of the city, as well as the history of cartography.

The sheet map above (in detail) and below was made by Dutch cartographer Arent Roggeveen and published in 1675. It's one of the first maps on which the name Manhattan is printed. Although the English had already taken the colony from the Dutch, renaming it New York after the Duke of York, this map still calls it Nieu Nederland.

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

Arent Roggeveen also published this atlas in 1675. Roggeveen means "rye peat" in Dutch. In those days, people would clear a section of marsh and burn the grass to provide a guiding light for ships. Roggeveen played on this by calling his atlases the "the burning fen," and including images of burning marsh grass "There's a lot of word play and allegory embedded in these maps," Knutzen said.

Roggeveen's atlases were designed for navigation, and in addition to standard overhead maps they included profiles of coastlines as they would look from an approaching ship. The page below shows Porta Porca -- Cuba's Bay of Pigs.

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

Another Dutch cartographer, Joan Blaeu, made this atlas. "The Blaeus were at the top of the heap of mapmakers in 17th century Holland," Knutzen said. It's not hard to see why. The images here come from a series of 11 atlases published between 1648 and 1664. "These were the first truly comprehensive atlases of the world, and represent a huge leap in European understanding of global geography," Knutzen said.

Unlike Roggeveen's atlases, the Blaeu atlases were made for merchants. This volume focuses on England, and it was meant to be a guide for Dutch merchants interested in doing business with their European neighbor. Owning a set of these atlases also allowed merchants to project a sense of geographic knowledge. In the image above, Dutch ships ply the waters of the Noordt Zee (North Sea). "You've got this sort of menacing Dutch presence here, like 'by the way, we've got you surrounded,'" Knutzen said. The beautiful illustrations below come from the title page (left) and a page of the atlas showing a selection of English royalty being poisoned, stabbed, and hammered to death.

Below that, at the very bottom is a selection of coats of arms, a useful resource for merchants who need to know who's in charge in an area where they're considering doing some business. A few spots are left blank, as if to encourage Dutch merchants to imagine their very own dukedoms.

This series of atlases have gilded calfskin bindings. And they sat on the public shelves of the main reading room until the 1940s. "It's amazing it's still here!" Knutzen said. Now it's safely stored in the map archives.

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

This gorgeous atlas was made by yet another Dutch cartographer, Pieter Goos, in 1676. Above is the title page for the delightfully named Zee-Atlas ofte Water-Wereld (Sea Atlas or the Water World). The page below shows the Zuiderzee, a shallow bay in the northwest of Holland, complete with rhumb lines, depth soundings, and other essential info for mariners.

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

The Castello plan of lower Manhattan was first drawn in 1660, when New York was still New Amsterdam. The original (see below) was presented by the Blaeu family to Cosimo III de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and rediscovered in a palace in Florence, Italy in 1900. The version above was redrawn from a photograph of the original in 1916.

A census of landholders accompanied the original 1660 version, Knutzen says. "We know who lived in all these houses, and what they paid for them, and what they all did." The document shows that even then, the city was fast becoming a melting pot of different languages and cultures.

Images: Alex Welsh/WIRED (above) / Wiki Commons (below)

Trouble was brewing in New York when this map was surveyed back in 1766 and 1767. The British Stamp Act of 1765, which required any printed materials to use heavily taxed stamped paper made in London, had not gone down well in the colonies. Riots ensued. Fortifications were built.

So the Brits sent surveyors to map the area in case military intervention became necessary. This map was made by Bernard Ratzer, but it was the personal copy of John Montrésor, one of the surveyors who preceded him. According to a bibliographic note on the map's verso, Montrésor himself penciled in the location of fortifications built after the Stamp Act Riots. It also locates, churches, synagogues, civic buildings as well as meeting and coffee houses. "These were places where people might be getting mad and having revolutionary thoughts," Knutzen said.

Ratzer's map was one of the first really detailed maps of New York, Knutzen said. It shows street names, property lines, and topographic information. "This is all strategically really important," he said.

Ratzer's map still has practical value today. The freshwater pond visible in the center of the top image is now the site of Collect Pond Park in Lower Manhattan. That's one of the areas that flooded last year in superstorm Sandy. "The freshwater pond found itself again," Knutzen said. Old maps like this hold many clues to the original state of the city and its coastline, and after the storm Knutzen compiled a selection of historic maps to aid the committee convened by the governor to improve the state's natural disaster preparedness. A sobering lesson emerged from the old maps: "Manhattan alone has increased its area by more than two times the area of Central Park by landfill," Knutzen said. "That area is almost exactly the area most badly flooded by Sandy."

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

This is a smaller scale version of Bernard Ratzer's map of New York City on the verge of the Revolutionary War, showing a larger area.

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

This map depicts the action during the battle at Bunker Hill early in the American Revolutionary War. Red lines represent British troop movements. The map was made for Stedman's History of the American War, published in 1793. It has a small leaf that pulls up to reveal events later in the battle.

The library also has a collection of sheet maps of Revolutionary War battles that were published as soon as 6 weeks after each battle took place. "They were printed and sold in London at coffee shops," Knutzen said. "It was news."

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

"What's cool about this map is it shows the city in transition," Knutzen said. Published in 1853 by Matthew Dripps, it shows a grey area below about 50th street that had already been developed. Uptown, colored regions show large parcels of land that were in the process of being broken up and sold. The grid was taking over.

Central Park didn't yet exist. But it would soon. The city used eminent domain to take the property. But it wasn't uninhabited. Many poor Irish and German immigrants and free blacks lived in an area called Seneca Village, near where Strawberry Fields is today. It may not have been the shanty town city officials made it out to be, as the next map in this gallery shows.

The large green block to the east of Central Park (below it on the map above) is an area called Jones's Wood. The city considered putting its large public park here instead of where Central Park is today, but the owners were reluctant to sell the land. In the 1860s and 70s the area was a weekend refuge for working class people, who'd come to relax and play by the banks of the East River. There was music and other entertainment -- not all of it of a wholesome variety, Knutzen said. But it wasn't meant to last. The land was too valuable, and by the end of the 1800s it was mostly developed.

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

This 1853 map belongs to a volume made by the New York City Common Council during the planning of Central Park. It shows a couple blocks in an area known at the time as Seneca Village, which was home to hundreds of people, mostly poor immigrants and free blacks. The city used eminent domain to relocate them and build the park.
"This is the most detailed documentary evidence of the village that was there," Knutzen said. Looking through these maps you can see churches, businesses, factories, and other multistory buildings. "It's a functioning community that's building on the city's tax block and lot grid," Knutzen said. The residents would have been paying taxes and voting. "It counters the narrative that it was a just bunch of hogs and sheep, that it was a shanty town."

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

William Perris was the first publisher of fire insurance maps in New York City. These maps indicate building materials and other features used to assess buildings and set premiums for fire insurance. This one is from 1855. If you look closely, Knutzen says, you can learn more than just how flammable a given part of town was.

"You can read a lot between the lines about the social and economic undercurrents of a neighborhood," Knutzen said. "You can infer something about who might be able to afford to live in these neighborhoods from what the buildings were made of." Colors indicate whether buildings were constructed from wood (yellow) or brick and stone (pink). The number of dots indicates the class of the materials: Buildings with just one dot are built with first class materials like a slate or metal roof and coped siding, whereas three-dot, third class buildings are made of cheaper materials, shingled roofs, and no fireproofing materials. Open dots indicate houses with stores on the first floor. Closed dots indicate buildings with no businesses -- which might be a sign of a quieter, more residential neighborhood.

Photos: Alex Welsh/WIRED

The Sanitary and Social Chart was created in 1864 to accompany a report to the Council of Hygiene of the Citizens' Association by one E.R. Pulling, M.D.. It's an early example of a thematic map intended to address issues of public health and policy. As you can see in the legend below, it flags a wide range of potential threats and nuisances, including: houses where smallpox or typhus has occurred, "Privies in an extremely offensive condition," "Sailor Boarding Houses" (here be syphilis?), the mysteriously off-putting "Insalubrious Localities."

Image: NYPL maps division

George Washington Bromley was another publisher of fire insurance maps. His map above shows Bryant Park and the New York Public Library in 1911, the year in which it was built. The map below, made in 1885 by Elisha Robinson, shows the reservoir that previously existed on the site. The thick stone walls of the reservoir are still visible in the library's basement.